


Jimmy Fallon Dishes About That Failed Nicole Kidman Date

by estherr



Category: Actor RPF, American Actor RPF, Australian Actor RPF
Genre: Alcohol, Almost adulterous thoughts but not really, Angst and Humor, F/M, Light Angst, Missed Chances, Pining, Regret, Swearing, This ship has sailed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-22
Updated: 2015-08-22
Packaged: 2018-04-16 14:01:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,834
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4627974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/estherr/pseuds/estherr
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Fucking Nicole Kidman, man,” Jimmy groaned, burying his head in his arms on the counter top.<br/>“You could have been,” Rick responded. He chuckled heartlessly and poured out another finger of scotch. </p>
<p>Or, the conversation I imagine Jimmy had with that mutual friend and terrible wingman, Rick.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Jimmy Fallon Dishes About That Failed Nicole Kidman Date

**Author's Note:**

> I never thought I'd be posting on ao3, let alone posting Actor RPF het fic where one half of the pairing doesn't even appear. How lame. Anyway, this is of course inspired by THAT interview, which I haven't been able to stop watching and its insane chemistry. Couldn't find any fic, so was forced to write it myself.
> 
> As a disclaimer, I don't even watch the Tonight Show, I know nothing about Jimmy Fallon beyond that interview, and the last Nicole Kidman movie I watched was probably Australia. Therefore I apologise in advance for OOC ness. I hope some people enjoy this anyway.

After receiving a series of poorly-spelled and increasingly threatening text messages, Rick found himself playing bemused therapist and bartender to the rumpled and miserable victim of his one and only attempt at match-making.

  
“Fucking Nicole Kidman, man,” Jimmy groaned, burying his head in his arms on the counter top.

  
“You could have been,” Rick responded. He chuckled heartlessly and poured out another finger of scotch. “Fucking her, I mean,” he added, just to rub salt in the festering open wound that was his friend’s tortured psyche.

  
“Yeah thanks, I got it, no explanation needed. Fuck. Now I’m thinking about it,” Jimmy sat up and downed the scotch, then put his head back down and tapped the rim. “Another, barkeep.”

  
“Isn’t that your limit for a weeknight, man?” Rick asked, pouring out another as he spoke.

  
“Yeah, but that was before the most beautiful woman in the world sat down and told me in front of a live studio audience that I’d fucking blown my only chance to date her a decade ago.”

  
Jimmy took the glass and stared down at the amber liquid for a moment.

  
“I mean, fuck. There I am, like a fucking moron, thinking I’m telling this funny awkward story about meeting her and having nothing but cheese and crackers in the house. And then bam! She tells me she _wanted_ me –”

  
“ _Liked_ you, man, she said she _liked_ you,” Rick interjected. Jimmy gulped down the scotch and continued.

  
“Fsck you, Rick, liked means wanted. So anyway, she tells me this, and I’m just having this mental breakdown, because it was ten years ago, fscking ten years, water under the bridge, she said it, we’re both married with kids right, it’s in the past-”

  
“Yeah, _way_ in the past,” Rick says meaningfully. Jimmy ignores him and barrels on.

  
“But then the whole rest of the interview, she’s like, right there, smiling at me, and laughing and playing with her hair and crossing her legs and isn’t that what women do when they’re turned on? I swear I read it somewhere – ”

  
“You googled it on the way over here didn’t you?” Rick accuses him, crossing his arms.

  
“Fuck you, I wiki’d it in my dressing room,” responds Jimmy without missing a beat, “I think on my feet, even when I’m having a nervous breakdown.”

  
“Yeah I can see that, which is why you’re here-”

  
“Venting to you instead of to Nancy-”

  
“About the how the most ‘beautiful woman in the world’-”

  
“My words, not yours-”

  
“Didn’t you hear the air quotes?”

  
“You can’t hear air quotes, asshole-”

  
“Whatever, the point is,” Rick paused. “What is the point? And are you sleeping here, because I got rid of my fold-out couch.”

  
Jimmy scruffs both hands through his hair wildly for a second, dislodging little flakes of dried hair product. They drift down like snowflakes and disappear in the marble-pattern of the counter top.

  
“Fsck, I don’t know. It’s just,” he blows out a long breath that reeks of alcohol. Rick wonders if he had a few drinks in the car, and thinks he’d better let him stay the night, even if he has to get out a blow-up mattress.

  
“Just what?” he prompts, in a kinder tone than he’s used so far all night.

  
“I just, ok it’s supposed to be a funny story, ancient history you can laugh about now, right? But. When I think about it now, I can’t laugh about it. It’s like, when I think back, I was this know-nothing 27 year-old asshole scraping along on SNL gigs, with nothing in the house but old Chinese food,” he laughs a little to himself, thinking of how she’d said that in the interview, her eyes sparkling with mischief and something more, “And there she was, just coming out of a marriage to fscking Tom Cruise, global movie star sex symbol, and she was a _woman_ , you know? Intelligent, classy, great sense of humour, rich, famous –”

  
“Beautiful,” Rick murmured unhelpfully. He had a sinking feeling in his gut. At the time it had been kind of a face-palm moment, realising that Jimmy hadn’t picked up on the signals Nicole had been sending out. Rick had brought her to his apartment for crying out loud. She was interested; it should have been a slam dunk!

  
When he’d asked Nicole how it had gone afterwards, she’d sounded so mortified at pushing herself (her words) on a guy who clearly wasn’t interested. A cute, smart, funny, talented younger guy (again, her words, at which Rick had gaped speechlessly) who didn’t need some older woman with a ton of emotional baggage to get in the way of his budding career (at this point Rick had been tempted to ask her who on earth she was talking about).

  
He’d kicked himself over it, realising that a woman who had suffered through a very public divorce after ten years of marriage might have some difficulty in putting herself out there again, even if that woman _was_ Nicole Fscking Kidman. Luckily he and Nicole had stayed friends, but he’d firmly sworn off any further match-making attempts, and vowed never to embarrass Jimmy or Nicole by bringing up the Date That Wasn’t.

  
Now, looking at the tipsy anguished mess sitting at his kitchen counter, Rick wondered if he’d made a mistake.

  
“Yeah beautiful, thanks, that’s well-documented and well-established, I got it ok,” Jimmy snapped, “Just fucking hear me out, I need to get this off my chest, shut up. Ok,” he took a deep breath, “She was all that, right?”

  
Rick nodded.

  
“And I was nothing, right?”

  
Rick nodded again, emphatically.

  
“And she saw past that, and she must have seen something that she liked. And she liked it enough to want to be with me, with _me_!” He gestured at himself, flailing slightly and Rick deftly snatched his glass out of the way.

  
“Yeah, yeah she did, and that was ten years ago, and she’s happily married to a country music star and you’re also married to a, a very lovely lady,” Rick tried to catch his eye, but Jimmy had buried his face in his hands. He mumbled something incomprehensible.

  
“What?” Rick leaned forward, trying to hear better.

  
“I made her laugh.” He said in a small voice. Rick grimaced and shook his head.

  
“You make lots of people laugh, Jimmy, it’s your job,” he said bracingly.

  
“But I made _her_ laugh, I always did,” Jimmy protested sadly. He rubbed at one eye, his wedding ring glinting ironically in the bright downlights of the kitchen. “God she has such a great laugh, I could listen to it all day.”

  
“Ok, this is just sad,” Rick slapped a hand down on the counter. Jimmy didn’t even flinch, lifting his head to gaze at Rick with big sad, tortured puppy eyes.

  
“She looked me in the eye, Rick,” he said slowly, as if sharing news of great import, “She looked me in the eye and told me that she would watch my show with Keith, and wonder if she would ever share that story with me. Do you know what that fucking means?”

  
“That she plotted her revenge for over ten years? Yes, she’s an evil, evil woman.”

  
Jimmy shook his head, and wobbled sideways alarmingly on his stool, before righting himself, never breaking eye contact. It was a little unnerving.

  
“No, it means that she still thinks of me, Rick. She’s been thinking about me, and how she liked me, for more than ten years. Even though she met someone else; even though she got _married_.”

  
He leaned forward unsteadily, his eyes wide.

  
“She fscking remembered what kind of hat and sweat pants I was wearing.”

  
Jimmy cursed repetitively when he’d had a few too many, Rick noted. He looked at the clock. Nearly 2am. Damnit. He had to be up and about in four hours, and he was pretty sure that Jimmy had to be too.

  
“Yeah, memory like a steel trap that woman,” he said, coming around to Jimmy’s side of the counter and ushering him to his feet and into the living room, “It’s probably from memorizing all those movie scripts, no big deal.”

  
He pushed his friend onto the couch, which was a little too short, but deep enough that Jimmy probably wouldn’t roll off it onto the floor. Probably. As a precaution, he dragged the sharp-edged coffee table away from the couch while Jimmy docilely took off his socks (he’d already taken his shoes off at the entryway) and lay down.

  
“Don’t go anywhere,” Rick told him, then went to his closet and pulled out a blanket. Coming back into the living room, he stopped for a moment at the sight of Jimmy just lying down and staring up at the ceiling blankly. It was a little creepy.

  
“Here you go buddy, sleep tight,” Rick tossed the blanket over him. “I’ve gotta be gone by 7:30 tomorrow morning, but help yourself to coffee and anything you want. Although I don’t think there is anything but coffee. Anyway,” he stopped himself from rambling, seeing that Jimmy hadn’t moved or reacted to anything he’d said, and continued in a softer tone.

  
“Jimmy, hey.”

  
A pair of brown eyes slowly tracked their way up to his face.

  
“Yeah, Rick?”

  
“You’re gonna be ok, ok? Yeah it’s not every day you find out that, well, that something happens that, but, well,” he stopped, feeling like a moron.

  
“I mean, you’ve got Nancy and the girls, you’re gonna be fine.” He bit his lip, wondering if he’d made things worse. After all, a ten year old celebrity encounter wasn’t supposed to hit this hard; he shouldn’t have to bring up the guy’s wife and daughters to reassure him, as if he’d suffered some great tragedy.

  
But he thought of what he’d seen in the interview; the shock and disbelief, the laughter, the smiles, that chemistry that was almost palpable. The fact that they hadn’t been able to stop talking about it. And she had remembered what kind of hat and sweat pants the idiot had been wearing. She had remembered everything.

  
Maybe it was a kind of tragedy. Not the kind of tragedy you saw on the news with ambulances and weeping families and grim-faced politicians making announcements. A different kind of tragedy; a tragedy of ships passing in the night, of miscommunication like in the Shakespeare you studied in high school.

  
Rick blinked at himself. He must have drunk more than he’d realised, just to keep Jimmy company.

  
“I know,” Jimmy said. He was slurring a little, the late hour and the drinks catching up to him. “I’ll be fine. I will be. But like, not yet. Is that ok?”  
Unsure whether he expected an answer, and wary of getting pulled back into a discussion, instead of replying, Rick back away from the couch and flicked off the living room light, then headed to his own comfortable bed. He had to get up early after all.


End file.
